Absolute

Overview

Absolute is an endpoint resilience platform. What sets it apart from other agent-based tools is where the agent lives: Absolute’s Persistence technology is embedded in device firmware by the major PC manufacturers, below the operating system. That means the agent survives a reimage, an OS reinstall, or a disk wipe, and reinstalls itself if someone removes it. Devices report in over the internet rather than needing to be on the corporate network.

Organizations use Absolute to keep an accurate picture of the hardware they own and to act on it remotely: tracking which devices are still alive and where they are, checking whether security tooling on them is actually running, and freezing or wiping a machine that has been lost or stolen.

The ReadyWorks Absolute connector reads that picture into the data fabric. It authenticates against the Absolute API with a token and a signing key, calls an endpoint you specify, and writes the response into a ReadyWorks staging table.

The value in combining it with other sources is coverage. Because Absolute reports from firmware over the internet, it commonly sees devices that Active Directory, Configuration Manager or Intune have lost track of: machines that have not been on the network for months, machines that were reimaged, machines a departing employee never returned. Correlating Absolute against those sources is how a stale asset register gets reconciled, and how the stragglers get found during a refresh or migration program.

This is an inbound-only connector. ReadyWorks does not write back to Absolute through it.

NOTE: Unlike most API connectors in the library, this one ships with a single generic job template rather than a set of prebuilt data pulls, and its API End Point is the placeholder /api/endpoint. You choose which Absolute endpoint to call. See Inbound Job Templates below.

Connector Properties

Authentication Methods

Two methods ship with this connector. Both are enabled, both are marked as default, and both are handled by the absolute.php driver. They take the same four fields; the difference is the kind of signing key you supply.

NOTE: Neither method stores a header or cURL recipe in the connector metadata. The absolute.php driver builds and signs each request itself from the Token Id and the key you provide. This is why there is no Authentication Configuration section for either method, unlike the REST connectors in the library.

Method 1: Asymmetric Encryption (ABSOLUTE_asymmetric)

Asymmetric Encryption Method

Signs requests with a private key. Supply the Token Id issued by Absolute plus the private half of a key pair; Absolute holds the public half. Use this method when the Absolute tenant has been set up for key-pair signing.

Connection Configuration Fields (4)

NOTE: The API Domain default points at Absolute’s United States API host. If the tenant is hosted in another region, replace it with that region’s host before saving the connection.

Method 2: Symmetric Encryption (ABSOLUTE_symmetric)

Symmetric Encryption Method

Signs requests with a shared secret. Supply the Token Id plus the secret key that Absolute issued alongside it, the same value held at both ends. This is the simpler of the two to set up, since there is no key pair to generate.

Connection Configuration Fields (4)

NOTE: Token Id, Private Key and Secret Key are all masked fields and are not readable back once saved. Keep a copy of the credential where your organization normally stores API secrets.

Inbound Job Fields Enabled (16)

These are the settings the job editor shows when you create or edit an inbound job on an Absolute connection. It is a shorter form than the general REST connectors offer.

NOTE: Pagination is partly exposed. API Pagination Node and Pagination Limit appear, but Pagination Type does not, so paging is driven by the node and limit alone. No enumeration fields are exposed at all, so a job cannot loop over a list of keys retrieved by another job. If you need enumeration against Absolute, build the job on the Generic Rest JSON API connector instead.

Inbound Job Templates (1)

Absolute API Call (Template 1)

A skeleton rather than a working job. The API End Point ships as the literal placeholder /api/endpoint, so the template does nothing useful until you replace it with a real Absolute API path. Both the destination table and the data identity are the generic name absolute_api.

To use it: copy the template into a new job, set API End Point to the Absolute endpoint you want, set API Return Data Node to the node in the response that holds the records, give Destination Table and Data Identity names that describe the data rather than the connector, choose a schedule, then set Enabled to Yes. If the endpoint returns more rows than one response carries, set API Pagination Node and Pagination Limit as well.

Because one connection can carry many jobs, the usual pattern is several jobs off this one template, one per Absolute endpoint, each writing to its own table.

NOTE: The last six settings above carry values because the job template table is shared by all 44 connectors. None of them is exposed in the Absolute job editor, so none has any effect here. The Inbound Job Fields Enabled table above is the authority on which settings actually apply.

Outbound Job Templates (0)

This connector is inbound only. No outbound job fields are enabled and no outbound job templates ship.